Great looking coop there, Stubbornhill!
One question - I noticed that you don't have a board/ledge in front of the nesting boxes for the hens to hop onto before they go into the box. Your hens just fly up to the upper boxes?
Our hens favored one box (as typical). That box had a bigger...
Looks like I'm the odd one here. I never till.
When we moved to this location, most of the soil where I wanted my garden was rock hard clay. I started in the fall with a load of composting manure, all the grass, leaves, straw, etc that I could get my hands on.
I did a lot of shallow planting...
We built ours up off the ground so the birds could walk underneath it, and ran fencing around that. In the summer, I take an extra piece of siding and lean it against the south fencing there to block some of the sun. In the winter, I move it to the north side to block some of the wind. That...